Dr. T. Tóth szerk.: Studia historico-anthropologica (Anthropologia Hungarica 19. Budapest, 1986)

ANTHROPOLOGIA HUNGARICA XIX. 1986 p. 5-10 Anthropology of postglacial historic populations By T. TÓTH (Received October 15, 1985) Abstract. A brief survey of the paleoanthropological investigations carried out in Hungary during the last three decades. The list of a number of publications is also given. The great success of the anthropological investigations, carried out on the osteological remains of historical populations which lived in the sequences of the postglacial geologic (Holocene) periods, has been convincingly demonstrated by the general paleoanthropological literature of the last three decades, including also some syntheses. The investigations have been made possible first of all by the establishment of paleoanthropological collections originating from different regions of the Eurasian continent. From the osteological remains of skeletalized populations which lived in the different postglacial periods of mankind there arose a very rich collection also from the territory of the Central Danubian basin; it became possible to make territorial and epochal comparisons on this basis. In the last decades a significant part of the material kept in central and county collections of Hungary (Anthropological Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest, Anthropological Institute of the University JA TE, Szeged, as well as in Debrecen, Eger, Pécs, Székesfehérvár, Veszprém) a total of finds of some 12 000 individuals, have been studied and the results published in about 270 papers in Hungarian and in foreign publications abroad, as well as presented at conferences, congresses or symposia. A preponderant majority of the subjects of the investigations derived from cranioscopic ana cranicmetric analyses. In addition to the papers mentioned above nearly twenty inaugural dissertations (rerum naturalium), three candidate dissertations of an academic degree (LIPTÁK 1956, TÓTH 1958, FARKAS 1975) and two academic doctorate theses (LIPTÁK 1967, TÔTH 1974) have been prepared on the basis of the materials preserved in our collections. In these craniologic investigations two different methodological conceptions found their expression. In a significant part of the papers the practice of the investigations has been mainly determined by individual typology (LIPTÁK 19 57, 19 59), but it cannot be regarded as identical in every case with individual diagnosis. Another part of the publications is characterizable by the microevolutionary morphological outlook using comparative group-diagnosis (TÓTH 1958, 1970). As well known the essence of the individual typology includes the demonstration of the elements of different taxa displayed by the skeletons under discussion, that is, per individual. This may be an unavoidable part of the analysis of the paleoanthropological finds, irrespectively wnether we are evaluating singular morphologic features or their complexes on the individuals of different skeletalized populations. In the early periods of this trend of the possibility of the identification of the morphological character complexes with the different taxa was not unambiguously clear. There is no doubt that the individual diagnosis is unavoidable in the elaboration of the finds nor can the relevance of the individual-typological determination be disclaimed in connection with skeletalized populations. Nevertheless its extreme variant, i.e. the quantitative (percental) determination of the frequency of type-elements furnish